Every weekday, I attend school and listen to my teachers teach. For this assignment, my listening skills were put to the test. I was questioned, “How well do I really know how to teach?” because the roles were reversed, and it was my turn to teach the teachers.  

---

The Assignment

I’ve had this blog for 3 years, and while I’ve changed and grown as a person, my blog’s format and content haven’t, and neither have my skills for updating it. For this assignment, I had to look past the surface of my blog and find new ways to customize it beyond my old and basic ways. I explored all of the features my blog platform had to offer and gave it a full glow-up. Then, I chose one that really intrigued me and taught my teacher how to apply it to his own blog.

New Skills

After experimenting with my blog and learning new skills, I gave it a major upgrade. Throughout this post, try to notice the new techniques I used to make my blog more engaging.

Customizing a SidebaR

One thing that made my blog stand out was the sidebar. Before exploring the settings, I thought the only thing I could add was basic elements like categories. However, I discovered a wide variety of widgets I could use, such as photo collages, mini games, videos, recent posts, and much more. Adding these features made my blog so much more engaging and fun. This is the skill I chose to teach my teacher how to use. 

Teaching my Teacher

To understand the importance of giving clear instructions, imagine this:

I don’t know how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It’s your job to teach me. You tell me to “spread the peanut butter and jelly onto bread.” I grab the peanut butter and jelly and use my hand to spread it onto the unopened bag of bread. This isn’t what you intended, but with the little amount of steps and detail you gave me, how would I know?

Now imagine you say:

“Grab the peanut butter, open the lid, open the bag of bread, use a knife to cut a slice off the loaf, put your piece of bread on a plate, use a butter knife to scoop out the peanut butter and jelly and spread it onto the slice of bread.” This time, I had clear step-by-step instructions and a load of details, and made a perfect PB&J.

 

This same concept applied when I was teaching my teacher how to decorate a sidebar. I created a PowerPoint presentation, where I listed out every single step and added photos to go along with them. Being descriptive really helped make the lesson much easier to follow and showed my teacher I truly understood what I was doing. 

F.A.I.L (first attempts in learning)

If I were to do this project again, I would consider all of the possible roadblocks that I could run into before I present my findings. One problem I ran into was that my teacher’s blog had a different theme and format than mine. Because of this, some of the steps didn’t work the same way and looked different on his blog. Next time I would test my instructions on many different themes to make sure they worked for everyone.